Steve Ballmer and the $50million Victim Act
In 1982, Blade Runner prophesied a future where corporations could tell us what to think — and make us thank them for it. That we’d be saturated with glowing screens selling propaganda dressed up as promotion, bowing to CEOs playing neon gods for apportioning us our slice of the American dream.
Like a frog in boiling water, we’ve let it happen one convenience at a time. We traded privacy for two‑day shipping, attention for dopamine, and truth for belonging. Now we’re sitting in the pot, baby — smiling, streaming, subscribing — wondering why the water feels warm.
Steve Ballmer didn’t have to build a Tyrell Corporation. He just built the Clippers and Intuit Dome. Same glow, fewer replicants, worse defense.
Steve’s Been Telling Stories Again
Since we wrote our response to the Clippers’ cap-cheating allegations, Steve’s been busy with damage control. The allegations? A $28 million “marketing” deal between Kawhi Leonard and a fintech startup called Aspiration, a distressed green energy company Ballmer personally invested $50 million in back in 2021.
The arrangement never passed the smell test. Kawhi never appeared in a campaign, no ads, no social pushes, nothing resembling $28 million in deliverables. It looked less like marketing and more like a side door around the salary cap—a way to funnel extra compensation to the franchise’s biggest star without reporting it as team payroll.
Ballmer’s defense is simple: he didn’t know. Aspiration acted on its own. The company was nearly insolvent, he said, and any overlap between his ownership stake and Kawhi’s payout was purely coincidental. On September 5th, he told ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne:
“These are guys who committed fraud. How would I be able — look, they conned me. They conned me. I made an investment in these guys, thinking it was on the up and up, and they con me. At this stage, I have no ability to predict why they might have done anything they did, let alone the specific contract with Kawhi.”
I laughed out loud at this quote when I first saw it. I’m in portfolio management; I work with deep-pocketed investors, know their type. They don’t just drop $50million into a distressed asset without:
Expected returns: Whether financial or otherwise.
Control: Installing board members, taking liens on assets as collateral for the investment, voting shares.
Follow up: “How is my investment doing?”
And when you’re bailing out a company on the brink, you have them over a barrel until the check clears. Whatever Steve wanted out of this deal, he asked for it.
Et tu, Aspiration?
On Monday, eleven former Aspiration investors filed suit accusing Ballmer of using the company “to secretly funnel millions of dollars” to Kawhi Leonard. The filing claims he wasn’t a passive shareholder at all—he was complicit. It’s the legal equivalent of your co-conspirator standing up in court and saying, “Actually, he planned it.”
It’s the classic billionaire mistake: believing control is permanent. Ballmer thought he could disown a $50 million investment and still dictate the narrative. Instead, he handed the microphone to the very people he tried to scapegoat. Hubris, laid bare.
The timeline we’re learning is damning:
Kawhi was up for a new contract in free agency in the summer of 2021
The Clippers announce he’s re-signing with them in August.
In September, investing firms under the control of Ballmer approach Aspiration with a $50million check
It looks like the $28 million under‑the‑table payment was to sweeten the deal to stay with the Clippers. Which begs the question: who else was bidding for Kawhi’s services in 2021?
The Non-Bidding War
In 2021, Kawhi’s market was a Monopoly board with one property: Los Angeles. Toronto was too far. Kawhi’s family is in Los Angeles — that’s why he wanted out of Toronto in the first place. The geography was non‑negotiable. The Lakers were already maxed out. The Clippers weren’t bidding against anyone — except Ballmer’s own insecurity.
Ballmer’s insecurity got the better of him. Risk is for the broke — Steve bought insurance.
And the thing is, we’ve seen this movie before — not at Intuit Dome, but in Redmond.
Same Old Steve Ballmer
In the history of technology, few men ever misread leverage quite like Steve Ballmer. His career began not in the fire of vision but in the echo of someone else’s. At Microsoft, he was the loudest man in the quietest room. Gates built things. Ballmer was the mouth of the operation: build consensus, shout down detractors, make sure that Bill had a social life outside the office.
But in 1986, when Windows was still anything but inevitable, he made his move. He wanted it dead. Ballmer told Gates to kill Windows. Scrap it. Fold the programmers into the IBM partnership. OS/2 was the future, he said. Let’s stop wasting time on this half-born graphical toy. It’s one of the great ironies in corporate history: the man who would later run Microsoft was the same one who tried to bury its soul alive.
Gates, to his credit, refused. The same cold-eyed paranoia that made him unbearable at dinner parties saved the company. He hedged. Kept Windows alive — a zombie project on life support. And when IBM’s OS/2 turned out to be a bureaucratic tomb, Gates already had the escape hatch preinstalled. You know how that story ends. Windows becomes the OS of planet earth.
So when Bill Gates had to name a successor during the Dot Com Crisis of 2000, he reached for Ballmer, out of loyalty to an old friend.
Ballmer inherited the cheat code of the century — in the software business, you build once, sell infinite — and wasn’t satisfied. He was convinced that Microsoft needed to pivot to hardware. So while the software golden goose printed money, that money was set ablaze developing new gadgets. Remember the Windows Smartphone? Me neither. The Zune music player was an iPod without charisma. The Microsoft Surface was an iPad for insurance agents. When the Windows smartphone flopped, Ballmer doubled down on mobile by acquiring Nokia, only to write down its value to zero later. Even Steve’s “successes” in hardware are quietly failures: court documents in 2021 showed that Microsoft has never turned a profit on Xbox hardware, despite the software side of gaming becoming profitable.
Truly, the greatest move Microsoft made during the Ballmer era, was to terminate him. Under Ballmer, from 2000 to 2014 Microsoft’s share price fell over 40%. Under his sucessor, shares have risen over 1600%.
When Gates read his prepared remarks to end Ballmer’s run, he cried. Wall Street didn’t. The stock jumped seven percent before the tears were dry.
Second Verse, Same as the First
Steve outbid Guggenheim Investments and Oprah Winfrey just to prove he had the deepest pockets. He bought the Clippers from Shelly Sterling for $2 billion, and for the first time in his life, there were no shareholders to answer to, no board to talk him down. He could finally run things the way he’d always wanted — loud, expensive, and certain he was right.
He built the most costly roster in basketball, writing luxury-tax checks like he was desperate for the tax write-off. Then he dropped another $2 billion on Intuit Dome — a glowing neon cathedral to his own legend.
And what has a decade of that spending bought him?
Two trips to the second round.
One Western Conference Finals loss.
Five first-round exits.
Two seasons without a playoff berth.
Still the oldest team in U.S. sports history never to play in a championship game.
After the Clip-Gang’s March 12, 2024 loss to the Timberwolves, Anthony Edwards was asked what he saw out there. “Bunch of mismatches,” he said. Sure, Kawhi was out with back spasms — but when your defensive org chart only goes one deep, that’s not bad luck. That’s design.
So last summer, Ballmer doubled down on the past. Brook Lopez, Bradley Beal, Chris Paul, Nic Batum — a roster built like a museum exhibit. He finally broke a record, all right: the oldest team in NBA History.
It all goes back to the original sin — not seeing the value in what he already had. At Microsoft, he tried to kill Windows. As the Clippers’ owner, he traded Shai Gilgeous-Alexander — a self-compounding asset — for Paul George, whose value had already peaked and was priced accordingly.
He’s been trying to resurrect that trade ever since, one tax check at a time.
The Echo Chamber of Copium
I dropped into r/Clippers to see how they were handling the news. What I found was… alarming.
Once you sift through the usual “plight of the Clippers fan” material — like celebrating that Kawhi says he might play both games of a back-to-back, because mediocre effort has been normalized — you start finding the real delusions.
Take the Ty Lue story. It doesn’t even allege a crime. It simply notes that he lives in Las Vegas during the offseason, is friends with Chauncey Billups (whom he later hired as an assistant), and is often seen playing cards at the Aria High-Limit Bar with Damon Jones.
That’s it. Optics. Context. Normal reporting.
And Clippers fandom? They decided it was a hit job. Unfair. Circumstantial. “Anti-Clipper bias.” Reality management in real time.
And I keep wondering — what has Ballmer done for Clipper Nation that they sprint to his defense like this? What engenders this blind loyalty?
Case in point: one commenter tried to break through the noise, writing, “Investigative journalism is not a personal attack on you. You can love and support the Clippers and also want those in power to be held to account.”
He was downvoted into the Earth’s mantle.
Meanwhile, other threads are full of people complaining that the Intuit Dome app charged them $105 for nachos they never ordered, or celebrating the Dodgers’ World Series win by linking an old JJ Redick interview where he admits he wouldn’t let the Dodgers show him on the jumbotron — because he knew he’d get booed for being a Clipper.
That’s when it hits you. They’re still convincing each other they’re the victims here. That the reporting is unfair.
By the time the Trailblazers came to Los Angeles recently, their head coach Chauncey Billups had already been detained for questioning for his involvement in a gambling scandal. Ben Golliver of the Washington Post reported that Clippers fans were chanting “FBI” while the Blazers shot free throws. It’s beyond irony — it’s projection.
Fans of an organization accused of funneling money through shell companies chanting “FBI” at someone else.
That’s the Ballmer Doctrine in miniature: when caught, double down, get louder, and convince yourself the real problem is the journalist who noticed.
Like owner, like crowd.
The Cult of Personality
Steve Ballmer isn’t a visionary, he didn’t invent anything. To be sure, his use of gaslighting as PR is a well-trodden playbook among billionaires.
Modern billionaires don’t build products; they build myths. They turn charisma into currency and sell confusion as leadership. Teach people to doubt their own eyes, and you can pick their pockets while they blink.
• Trump wrote the manual: declare bankruptcy, call it genius. Every collapse becomes a “restructuring,” every indictment a “witch hunt.” Rebrand failure as persecution, launch a loyalty program.
• Musk industrialized the technique: promise Mars, deliver layoffs, and call exploding rockets “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” When the stock craters, tweet about aliens. It’s not strategy; it’s sleight of hand.
• Zuckerberg is a master of reframing: “We breached your privacy” becomes “We’re pioneering connection.” “We broke democracy” becomes “We’re launching Threads.”
• Bezos wraps exploitation in virtue: a trillion-dollar sweatshop marketed as “customer obsession.” When workers pee in bottles, go to space and call it “for all humanity.”
They don’t gaslight because they think we’ll believe them. They gaslight because they know we won’t fight them. We’ve been trained to treat common sense like a conspiracy theory. Question the billionaire? You must hate success.
They’ve replaced competence with charisma, and we’ve replaced accountability with applause. And the irony? We like it this way. We prefer our billionaires loud and flawed. It lets us believe that maybe we’d be just as rich if someone handed us the mic.
But here’s the truth: Ballmer’s Clippers aren’t cursed. They’re case study zero in the great American experiment of branding stupidity as strategy. The scoreboard’s been telling us the truth for ten years. We just keep buying season tickets to the lie.
Still think Steve’s actually a genius? Let me help with that. To buy the Clippers in 2014, he would have needed to sell $3billion of his Microsoft shares, netting $2billion after taxes. Those shares that he sold would have been worth $50billion today. If the Clips won championships for the next six years he’d still be underwater on the trade.
The Lights Are Still On
Steve can stall, spin, and scream “fraud” all he wants. But the league’s decision is coming next year, and I believe Adam Silver will be scorching earth.
Wouldn’t it be something if, just once, a billionaire didn’t get to declare himself the victim? If just this one time, the richest man in the room had to sit in it — like the rest of us do when we screw up?
And while we’re dreaming, maybe stop heckling the reporters doing their jobs. You don’t fix corruption by silencing the people shining a light on it.
I dumped the Clippers last week. Traded my loyalty for peace of mind. One week in, I feel lighter. Turns out, loyalty only gets you to the first round.
Blade Runner warned us about a world where corporations owned our thoughts — it just got one thing wrong. We didn’t need the corporations to enslave us. We volunteered. We bought the ticket, streamed the dream, and called it fandom.
The lights at Intuit Dome will keep burning long after the banners that never were. But somewhere in that glow, a truth hums under the noise:
You can’t gaslight the scoreboard.
Todd / 120 Proof Ball
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